


Remember When It Rained

by mooglecharm (morphaileffect)



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Anime/Video Game Fusion, Drama, Eventual Romance, Family, Family Drama, Inspired by Tenki no Ko | Weathering With You, M/M, Magic, Supernatural Elements, Tags Contain Spoilers, those relationship tags especially goshdarn it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 09:28:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29223231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morphaileffect/pseuds/mooglecharm
Summary: Gladio thought he was the only "Weather Child" - a person with the power to pray to the gods to change the weather. But he meets another person with powers similar to his...though, unlike Gladio, this other "Weather Child" has been bringing a year of rain over the city of Insomnia.[A Gladnis /Weathering With You/ AU]
Relationships: Gladiolus Amicitia/Ignis Scientia, Prompto Argentum/Noctis Lucis Caelum
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bexii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bexii/gifts).



> Story inspired by a discussion on Twitter with Bexii, to whom this fic is dedicated ♥
> 
> Title thanks to [AnnatheLoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaTheLoon/pseuds/AnnaTheLoon), who introduced me to this [beautiful Josh Groban song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLf0annqwzU).
> 
> Also, listen to this great song from the Kingsglaive OST: [Praying for Rain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfZv4J3wdic)

_Something’s wrong..._

He unclasped his hands behind his back and let out a frustrated breath.

_It’s not working._

When Gladio opened his eyes, they were met by the sting of the winds and strong rain.

That was certainly strange...and there was a heavy feeling in the pit of Gladio’s stomach, that told him this was not a natural storm.

But there had been times, in the past, when his prayers didn’t work. It didn’t mean that there was anything out of the ordinary.

When it happened, there was one thing he had to do: go higher.

_The closer to the sky, the better._

The highest point in the area was a lighthouse off in the distance - but it was activated, the fog lights on - someone was certainly here. And Gladio couldn’t afford to let anyone see him in prayer.

The other high point was a rocky part of the cliffs overlooking the ocean. Fortunately, it was within sprinting distance.

He headed there.

The winds were high, the rocks were slippery, and it wasn’t an easy climb. But Gladio was determined to get to the top.

There was a passenger ferry, far from the shore but visible. It was being tossed around violently by the waves.

If he didn’t stop this freak storm soon, people were going to die.

In the past, he’d only had to use his power to do little things - bring out the sun on a game day, for example. Make someone’s birthday weather a little less bleak. Things that weren’t urgent, and so it didn’t matter if his prayers worked or not.

They had better work now.

Gladio was not expecting that someone was already going to be standing on top of the cliff when he got there.

And it was someone so lean and light, the winds should have surely made him unsteady on his feet. They already whipped his short-cropped brown hair about his head as if they were trying to pull him up out of the ground that way.

But the young man just stood there - unmoving.

Hands clasped behind his back, head bowed in prayer.

Gladio stared at him, dumbstruck.

_No..._

It couldn’t be.

He was the only one...wasn’t he?

The young man’s back was turned and Gladio couldn’t see his face. But there was something about him...something that made Gladio’s blood run cold.

Even if the young man was like him - even if he stood on the highest isolated point, praying, the way Gladio fully intended to do as soon as he got to the top - something told Gladio he wasn’t trying to end the storm.

_“Hey!”_ Gladio yelled urgently.

The young man raised his head. Turned it toward the sound of Gladio’s voice reluctantly.

_“Hey,”_ Gladio said again, loudly. _“Stop this! Right now!”_

The young man gasped. He turned abruptly to Gladio.

And it was as if his green eyes burned through the curtain of rain that separated them.

The sight made Gladio fall still. He had never seen himself while deep in prayer. Did his eyes blaze like that, too?

There was confusion on the young man’s face.

“You,” he stammered, “you can’t be here.”

It was strange how his voice carried so well in the chaos, though he spoke so quietly...as if a had tunnel opened up around them, with the two of them standing in the middle.

“This storm,” Gladio said, a bit more calmly now, somehow confident that his voice would also reach its target without needing to be loud. “It’s your doing, isn’t it?”

The green flame in the young man’s eyes seemed to flicker and dim. 

He didn’t answer.

“You gotta stop it,” Gladio said, taking a few more steps toward the young man. “There’s a ship out there. If it capsizes, the people in it are going to drown.”

“I can’t,” the young man said. “I can’t stop it.”

The regretful but unyielding tone of his voice told Gladio that it wasn’t that he _couldn’t_ do anything about the storm -

\- it was that he _wouldn’t_.

“I’m sorry,” the young man said sadly.

It was an apology from someone about to do something truly terrible.

He turned his back on Gladio and clasped his hands behind his back again.

And then Gladio had a choice.


	2. Chapter 1

_Four weeks earlier..._

“‘Weather children’?”

It was the first time Gladio had ever heard such a term.

“Yeah,” Prompto affirmed. “I overheard the old ladies at the bus stop say - if there were weather children around, there wouldn’t be this much rain. So I sat down with them and asked them what they meant.”

This turned out to be one of the many times Gladio ended up being happy that he took Prompto under his wing. Prompto seemed to have taken to the title of “internet journalist” quickly. It was his first real job, or so he said, but he was what Gladio would call a “natural”.

So when Prompto brough up a topic that interested him, Gladio made sure to listen.

“So it’s been raining for a whole year, right?” Prompto had taken it upon himself to pull up a chair and sit on it...backwards, legs splayed out on either side of the backrest. “It’s all around freaky weather. The old ladies say it’s because the Hydraean’s been awakened - in a really bad way, mind - and only children favored by the Hydraean would be able to appease her anger.”

The scrawny Prompto might think of himself as shy, but Gladio already knew that he was better around people than he thought. Especially when he was in pursuit of a lead; his “nose for news” did the talking for him.

It got him talking to strangers at the bus stop, and it's getting him to speak animatedly about that conversation to Gladio now.

“I asked how children who had the god’s favor could help, and that’s when they told me,” Prompto continued. “Some children are born with the power to pray to the gods that blessed their birth, and change the weather. Those ladies, they said that when they were younger, and lived outside of Insomnia, weather children were a fact of life. They prayed to drive away storms before harvest season, and bring rains during drought. Weather children were extremely rare, they said, so a village that has even one of them is considered blessed.”

The belief that all weather-related matters were due to the meddling of the Astrals, the unpredictable gods of Eos, was not uncommon among older folk. Gladio had even heard his own grandfather say he was born with the Infernian’s blessing, because he was born on an unseasonably hot spring day.

But he had not heard his grandfather, or any older person, talk about “weather children” before.

“So I was thinking, maybe we should pound the pavement,” Prompto said excitedly. “And maybe find an actual weather child in the process?

“What are the odds of that?” Gladio challenged.

Prompto mused on this a bit, then shrugged. “I dunno. But we’re not starting from zero, I think? One of the ladies gave me a lead: she swore that one of her childhood friends from the village was a weather child. This friend has a granddaughter who lives in Insomnia now. When I said I was a reporter, I got her contact info. We can interview the granddaughter, maybe?”

Gladio made a show of thinking about it.

Then he very calmly said “Let’s do it.”

Prompto let out a whoop and jumped out of his seat, did a little celebratory dance.

“I swear, this is the one, Gladdy,” he said, as he rode his high. “The one that’ll launch our zine into internet stardom.”

“Don’t call it a ‘zine,’” Gladio snarled without bile. “It’s an online magazine. We’re professional and commercial. And don’t call me ‘Gladdy.’”

Prompto pouted, deflated all of a sudden. “Iris calls you ‘Gladdy,’” he argued.

“I also helped change Iris’ nappies when she was a baby. By law, she gets to call me whatever she wants.” Gladio slid out of his office chair. “You, I found about to die from hypothermia outside my office. You get to call me ‘Boss.’”

“FINE,” Prompto whined, but with a note of deference. It was true, after all: he had taken shelter from the rain near Gladio’s office one night, three months ago. He had no place to stay, and had been banking on the hope that no one was going to kick him out of the cozy alleyway he’d found, at least until the morning.

But, as luck would have it, Gladio lived in a flat above his own office. Restless one evening, he stepped out and found Prompto sleeping amid the rubbish, disguised as a garbage bag to avoid being ejected from the premises.

Having nothing better to do, Gladio invited the poor starving, shivering kid up to his flat for a hot meal and a place to sleep.

And then offer him a job the very next day.

He’d been taken in by Prompto’s seemingly boundless energy and passion for the new. Having grown up around hard-nosed journalists and publishers all his life, he felt it made for good journalistic material.

Prompto was raw and inexperienced yet, but Gladio's instinct paid off in little ways, like this.

“Just one thing,” Gladio said. “I get to go with you to this interview.”

“Eh?!” Prompto cried, clutching his chest as if well and truly shocked. “Are you serious? You _never_ go to interviews.”

“I’m going to this one,” Gladio blinked lazily. “Is that a problem?”

Prompto enthusiastically shook his head.

“No, no, not a problem,” he brightly answered. “Boss!”

***

Ignis’ phone rang as he was making dinner.

Noct had just come home from his part-time job. Ignis wished the phone had rung just a few minutes earlier.

As it was, he needed to step out of the apartment - even out of the building, so he could be sure Noct wouldn’t overhear.

“I have to take this,” he said to Noct by way of apology.

Ignis’ dark-haired younger ward looked at him with concern for a split second. Then a look of nonchalance took over his face, as he waved Ignis off.

He knew when Ignis received a call from the Family, perhaps. And he knew enough to stay out of it, when it happened.

Ignis and Noctis had talked about it, after all. They had come to an agreement: Noct was going to be perpetually “busy with his studies.” And Ignis would take every call from the Family that either of them would get.

It was so they would only have one story to tell.

One the Family would find palatable.

They had been hiding so much from them, after all. Noct working at a McDonald’s part-time? Not in the Family agenda. Ignis taking three jobs to save up? Definitely not something the Family should know about.

Ignis was Noctis’ minder. He was receiving an allowance for it. Noct received a separate allowance. They could always ask for more, as long as they said what it was for.

They didn’t need to take side jobs, or save money.

If they wanted to stay within the Family.

“This is Ignis,” he greeted, as soon as he had stepped out of the building.

 _“Ignis,”_ the person on the other end of the line said. _“You should have emailed your travel itinerary hours ago.”_

Ignis inwardly sighed.

Drautos was either feigning ignorance, or he really hadn’t been reviewing Ignis’ correspondence.

Either of which was usual for him, to be honest - the Family’s hatchetman was not known for being patient with bureaucratic matters.

“I believe I’ve already sent a response,” Ignis answered, as calmly as he could manage. “The weather does not permit any travel plans.”

 _“It’s just a little rain,”_ Drautos answered, the sarcasm biting. _“You’ve put off traveling home for over a year because of that?”_

“You may call it ‘a little rain’...but with all due respect, Drautos - you are not in Insomnia, watching the weather change by the hour.” There were stronger, coarser ways to say how Ignis felt, but he would not stoop to them, not while he could help it. “A drizzle in the morning could mean a thunderstorm in the afternoon, and the weather channels wouldn’t even be able to predict it accurately. As the person looking after Noct’s welfare, I will _not_ risk his life by forcing him to travel under these conditions.”

He did his best to sound authoritative, even menacing. He was in charge of everything about Noct. The Family needed to feel like they could continue to trust him.

And “menacing” was a tone they understood, if not downright respected.

 _“Almost a year now, Ignis.”_ There was acid in Drautos’ undaunted voice. _“His father is now more than merely concerned that you may be hiding him from us.”_

They should have traveled home from Insomnia for a brief visit at some point, Ignis was aware - but he had put his plans into motion, and if things went well, Noctis would never have to go home to see his father again.

Never again.

_“Don’t think we’ve forgotten what you did on his 18th birthday.”_

A shudder ran up Ignis’ spine. But if Ignis had a piece of coin for every time that memory brought him a measure of pain, he would not even need to take three jobs.

“He checks in with his father personally every weekend,” he reminded the person on the other end of the line. “No one is hiding anything. The weather is just what it is, Drautos.”

Ignis said Drautos’ name with calculated spite. Whenever anyone in the Family called each other by their first or last names, it seemed it was always with a touch of venom.

This - among other, darker things - was something Ignis Scientia had had 22 years to learn.

 _“You’ve been warned,”_ Drautos relayed, _“that if we don’t hear from you about bringing the Heir home by the end of the month, we_ will _come to fetch him. And you. Weather notwithstanding.”_

Indeed, Ignis had been warned. But he would not be intimidated.

“This is noted, Drautos,” he said coldly. “Inform the Head that there is no need for concern. I will always have the Heir’s best interests at heart.”

Drautos made a vague sound of acknowledgement, and ended the call.

Ignis drew a slow, deep sigh as he put his phone away.

He had been trying not to think about it too deeply, in light of all the other things he’d had to worry about.

But he had put off the inevitable for far too long. Now, it seemed he only had a few weeks to decide what he and Noct were going to do.

The evening was getting late. The rain was letting up: Ignis noted this with some alarm.

For the past year, his excuse for not following orders had been the weather. And he needed to be consistent.

So, throwing away his concerns for the moment, disregarding everything else - he placed both hands behind his back, clasped one hand with the other.

Bowed his head.

And prayed.


End file.
